Towards a decentering of the listener in planning and design research: Attuning to affective sonic materiality for transitory railway space along Brussels Line 28

Within a context of militarized urban transformation seeking sonic strategies for dealing with alienation, repression and immobility, the importance of understanding and operationalizing sound’s affective and disruptive capacities, is quintessential. A situated engagement with affective sonic materiality in urban planning and design research promotes a rethinking of the position and role of sound in urban development and simultaneously becomes an instrument of sonic artistic and critical spatial practice. Through exploratory longitudinal case study focusing on old industrial railway space conversion into greenspace along Brussels line L28, I studied how a decentering of human listening and sonic experience necessitates the planning and design of new sonic (infra-)structures in ways that breaks those confines whilst facilitating the (co-)production of alternative sonic futures emancipated from certain impasses. By connecting the avant-garde work of urban sound researchers and curators to the experiences and practices of young people involved in urban transformation, I aim to set out a path to a sonic vocabulary, methods, tools, and techniques for a relational, performative engagement with sonic matter in planning and design research.